Seoul Village on Substack

It's always the same story. I grow comfortable with a new medium, and another one pops up, ruining the affair and leading to further polygamic writing.

If you don’t know me, my name MOT means ‘word’ in French, and I define writing as my most embarrassing bodily function. I spare you the early www days but basically, there was a first shift from internet fora to personal sites (I opted for Geocities). Then I fell for another format, perfect for my short bursts: the blog. Vaccinated by the Geocities collapse, I picked a mainstream plaftorm, Blogger, and started spilling my ‘blogules’ all over the place, and soon spun off half a dozen active verticals in two languages on culture, on tech, or on Korea (enter SeoulVillage in 2007).

I really enjoyed posting on topics I loved, from culture and urbanism to politics and sports. In my hayday, I would commit several posts every day and reach millions of pages viewed every month. I even accepted to make a special blog on soccer and tech during the 2006 FIFA World Cup for CNET, who noticed that I had one of the most popular blogs on the game in French (the offbeat ‘footlog’), and a more serious one on innovation in English (‘mot-bile’).

I resisted SNS as long as I could before falling for the usual suspects. Facebook and Twitter were time consuming, but the ideal complement to the blog: the former to anchor it, the latter to pile up / browse through memos that didn’t deserve full posts. Of course, serving Zuck and later Elon became a moral hazard, and I tried alternatives that never picked up.

So far, I’d been resisting Substack because as much as I respected the vision, I’d maintained newsletters and I knew how demanding they can be, particularly for a guy who’d already all but abandoned most of his blogs and platforms, and dreams of devoting more time for his miserable fiction.

Yet. Following Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram*, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and probably others I forgot, I have to make sure that’s there’s a legit SeoulVillage on key platforms.

So this SeoulVillage Substack will be, as the name suggests, yet another stack, but also, who knows, a sub who could make the ineluctable end of the game a bit more fun.

Seoul Village on Substack: substack.com/@seoulvillage

 

Welcome to my Korean Errlines.

Stephane

Seoul Village 2025
Welcome to our Korean Errlines! Follow Seoul Village on Facebook, Bluesky, Threads, Substack, and X/Twitter, follow me on Instagram.
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* yup that’s the personal Insta, but because Zuck’s UI sucks, I seldom post on the SeoulVillage one.